A friend of mine texted me a few weeks ago; the company he works for had been suddenly thrust into the limelight on a national scale and not for a good reason. I don’t want to discuss the details here but he found himself at a difficult crossroads; staying at a well-paying job where he didn’t agree with the ideals or give up his pension and risk everything by jumping into a new career. As our conversation continued, several key points came to the surface which helped me understand the complexity of the issue—effectively deflating my attempts to cheerlead him into a better frame of mind.
I’m a big ‘put the shoe on the other foot’ guy and when I tried to imagine myself walking 10 steps in his, no solution materialized. So I tried to imagine how exactly I would deal with it, my fingers – almost involuntarily – typed a response, “I think you just need to go fishing.” He responded quickly, “I think you’re picking up what I’m putting down.”
So we made plans to make a drive the next day to the Cape where I knew there was open water and a better than average chance of hooking up. I felt that our best bet was to go throw jerkbaits for trout – bouncing around between a few upper Cape kettles. I wanted the fishing to be mindless and hoped that just spending some time…doing anything else but thinking about the weight of the world wrestling his mind to the mat would relieve some of his stresses.
We arrived at pond number one and, almost immediately, we had our licenses checked by a local official, we were both ‘legal’ and the cheerful lady sent us on our way. As we entered the cold water with a persistent 15 mph north wind dropping the ‘feels like’ temperature into the low 20s, we did the leapfrog routine hitting several spots that had produced fish for me in the past. The conversation ranged from the Russia-Ukraine war to the finer points of fishing a jerkbait. When we arrived on a subtle point he hooked the first fish of the day, a rainbow of maybe 14 inches. He bled the holdover fish and laid it on the shore. The bite was tough and after an hour we still only had the one fish on the board with one solid swing and a miss by Yours Truly.
Making our way back to the truck, cold to the bone, we retrieved his fish stashed on the shore and continued our trudge. Right before we stepped back onto dry land we decided to make 10 more casts. On my third or fourth, I hooked a brown of comparable size and offered it to my friend—one trout is not a meal for his family of four, and two would probably only serve he and his wife. He dispatched the small brown and turned his back to the shoreline. I just happened to be looking back and saw a mature red-tailed hawk gliding down to within 25 feet of my friend and the two trout. This bird was not scared of us and proved to me that he had stolen many table-bound trout from unsuspecting anglers in the past. He repeatedly made eye contact with both of us and moved closer with the kind of wild animal comfort that makes you uneasy. After some pantomimed sorcery with his fishing rod, the hawk backed off just enough, we grabbed the fish and made prints for the lot—the hawk followed the whole way! We escaped the ‘ordeal’ without any talon marks or flying feathers.
On the ride home it was obvious that our afternoon of trout fishing had a positive effect on my friend and his outlook. I knew it had hit the mark squarely when his next few text messages were about buying a rod for fishing jerkbaits and a photo of the cooked trout next to a page from a cookbook. Fishing, by itself, absolutely can be a therapeutic experience, but it’s those other little things that happen that remind us how unpredictable life can be and just how important it is to focus on living inside of each moment, noticing the ticks of every second as they pass.
